photo #5969853

While on a Renaissance art tour of Italy, Mim Allison (Member 49,766) came across a Cumulonimbus storm cloud inside the Piccolomini Library at the Siena Cathedral. It was on the library wall, in one of the ten large frescoes painted in the early sixteenth century by Renaissance artist Pinturicchio that depict the life of Pope Pius II. The glowering storm pours down onto ships in the Port of Ancona. Its strong winds fill the sails as they sweep along dark sheets of rain. Amid these questionable conditions, a large group is heading off on a journey. Cardinal Domenico Capranica rides a white mule, and, in the foreground, his secretary, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who would later become Pope Pius II, sits astride a white horse. This was 1431 as the Cardinal’s train headed to Switzerland to meet the Council of Basel. Despite the ominous storm, an optimistic sign beckons the future pope forwards: morning sunlight illuminates clouds and shafts of rain in gold and colours a rainbow extending from the storm to the hillside ahead.Enea Piccolomini Leaves for the Council of Basel (1502-1507) by early sixteenth-century Italian artist Pinturicchio, in the Piccolomini Library, Duomo, Siena, Italy.